Monday is one of those days where you wake up after having a relaxing weekend and don’t want to do any work. Don’t worry, everyone feels this way and some will say that it’s because you don’t enjoy your job. I think that’s wrong though. I absolutely love my job but when it comes to Monday for a software developer, it’s usually the beginning of a new sprint. That’s right folks, it’s time for sprint planning.
For those who aren’t familiar, sprint planning is the time at the beginning of a sprint where you outline the product backlog items and the tasks that you want to complete over a certain time period, in our case, two weeks. Every company will plan differently but the general concept is the same. You get together as a team, sometimes with the product owner, discuss the AC for each of the prioritised backlog items in the sprint, provide an estimated effort and then assign it to a person to manage. The backlog item is then broken down into individual tasks for various members of the team depending on the nature of the work and the time to complete those tasks is then estimated. At the end of the day, you have a jam packed sprint with every member filled up to capacity and your sprint begins the next day.
The only problem that developers can have with planning however is that it can be very long. We might have it lucky, only having to spend around 5/6 hours on a single day to plan a sprint, but that’s 5 or 6 hours you’re sitting around in a meeting room planning everyone’s work, not just your own, when you’re eager to get some coding done. From my own experience though, put that to the back of your mind. Get your thinking cap on and stay alert. Read the AC carefully, estimate your effort with thought and make your Monday the best day of the week. If you start off your week on a low, you’ll be demotivated for the rest of the sprint. Keep positive and be awesome!
But most of all,
Keep coding!
